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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#581

Post by reportgunner »

eYrKEC2 wrote: post #390
friend_and_foe wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's done with Ubuntu. It's just not good. Its got a stereotype at this point for being the easy noob distro but that's not even true. Its top to bottom awful and has been for many years.

Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.

What machine are you using ?

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#582

Post by indymike »

JohnFen wrote: post #524
indymike wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what is expected on LTS releases and is what is expected by people that highly value long term support releases. That said, I think modern security and modern software development practices have obsoleted a lot of the thinking behind LTS releases.

Sadly, modern software development practices have neutered a lot of LTS releases -- but the need for real LTS releases is stronger than ever.

> but the need for real LTS releases is stronger than ever

Actually, I think the LTS mentality is one of the bigger problems in security right now. The hardest problems I've had to deal with in tech all stem for LTS:

* Getting an not-substantial budget to update an essential but forgotten server with custom software and an unpatched heartbleed problem.

* Convincing developers to even look at old web services that have massive SQL injection and were built with libraries with known (six years ago) exploits, all running on some 13 year old version of RedHat.

* Inevitable meetings where you try your best to avoid saying "I told you so" when a disclosure, cryptolocker or malware infestation happens because of the above. These are no fun because they quickly devolve into career-end bingo.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#583

Post by dzamo_norton »

sockaddr wrote: post #259
Saris wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox” Guess what I got? A freaking snap. Yes, try it. I’m done with Ubuntu

Come back to Debian (testing, if you want new package versions).

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#584

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bombolo wrote: post #551
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With maintainers in the loop, there is at least one more person that can notice something is fishy Also one more person who can inject malware or break something. How did that Debian keygen issue happen again? Oh right.

> How did that Debian keygen issue happen again? The people on the openssl mailing list said it was fine. That's how it happened.

And yet the upstream developers themselves never incorporated the change, it was entirely because an unnecessary third party middle man made unnecessary changes.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#585

Post by necovek »

account42 wrote: post #566
necovek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bzr is a great counter example. Bzr "lost" because git had GitHub, whereas Launchpad was one too many things and slow to optimize for modern sensibilities. (And Linux used a different VCS before git, so that didn't matter in adoption) Imagine a world without GitHub, and I don't think git would be our go-to VCS. Though maybe not even Baazaar, but there are things like Mercurial too.

Git already had momentum before GitHub became popular. And yes, it is absolutely Linux and other high-profile projects that ensured its success in the OSS world. Claiming that Linux having used a different VCS before git means that Linux's use of git doesn't matter is really odd when git was developed for the Linux project.

It sure had momentum. As did a bunch of other distributed VCSes. If you were a party to voting what VCS to switch to for some of those high-profile projects, I'd very much like to hear about it.

In GNOME, a decision was delayed and bzr and git were pretty evenly matched.

Linux has previously used BitKeeper, but that didn't make it "win out", just like it didn't do so for Git. Sure, it wouldn't have existed if there wasn't a need for Linux.

I am only pointing out that it was GitHub that helped popularize arguably the worst UX among DVCSes: I don't hear people say "your free software contributions portfolio" — they'll just say "your GitHub profile".

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#586

Post by Karunamon »

cardanome wrote: post #501
Karunamon wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, there is no such thing as an average user. Also, it is not relevant to the discussion. I care about what I want in a system, not what some imaginary users want. In which case I hope you are prepared for software to get many times worse, because the software industry doesn't give a tuppeny fuck what you want in a system, they care what sells to the lowest common denominator. And that means slow, bloate…

Debian packages are maintained by volunteers, the software industry has nothing to do with this.

Open source is part of the industry.

You keep trying to hand wave this relatively straightforward point: users are already used to, and accepting of, slow and bloated applications. Therefore, the downsides that app containerization introduces are irrelevant to most people that will use them.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#587

Post by Jnr »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #577
Jnr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reasons they ship it with servers as well. So the first task after getting ubuntu up and running, you have to uninstall snap.

I'm curious - what's wrong with snaps on the server?

Same as on Desktop. They are terribly slow, resource hungry, update automatically.

On a bit older desktop I have seen it take 5-10 seconds just to start Chromium. And not the initial start after fresh install, it happens every single time. Meanwhile Flatpak or local packages start instantly on the same machine.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#588

Post by Jnr »

dizhn wrote: post #356
Jnr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reasons they ship it with servers as well. So the first task after getting ubuntu up and running, you have to uninstall snap.

LXD is a legit product. Too bad they only ship it as snaps. I think Debian finally has packages for it but I haven't tested it. I actually stopped using it because I don't want to use an Ubuntu stewarded project. More and more it's getting harder to use plain lxc. Almost all resources are talking about it in an lxd context nowadays.

After using lxc and then lxd for some time I switched to Docker and never looked back.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#589

Post by the_why_of_y »

necovek wrote: post #50
petepete wrote: post #9

Mir, Unity, now Snap. Ubuntu has a track record of wanting to go it alone. But, I'm all for competition, long may it continue. The only real negative here is that some apps will only release Snaps, others will only release Flatpaks and people will end up having to just revert to copr/AUR like before. Choosing a distro is basically choosing a DE and package manager these days anyway - a single unified packaging format…

To put things into context, snaps were created before flatpak: in a sense, RedHat wanted to go at it "alone" (or at least separately from Canonical) with xdg-app/Flatpak. These ideas were already present even before those times and outside of both RH/Canonical, so it was more of a who's committed first. Basically, Ubuntu phones were using click packages (predecessor to snaps) back in 2011 and 2012, with snapcraft shi…

Click was preceded by Alex Larsson's glick project, see this page from October 2007.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071012194830/http://www.gnome....

There was also glick2 in 2011.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111022070435/http://people.gno...

You may have heard of Alex Larsson as author of xdg-app.

I think the oldest related project was Klik, started in 2004 (and later renamed to AppImage).

This is his blog about the history of Flatpak.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/

Also, the reason why Canonical have "a problem getting the community involved" is that they put a KEEP OUT sign on every one of their projects in the form of a CLA requiring copyright assignment.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#590

Post by the_why_of_y »

necovek wrote: post #75
necovek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put things into context, snaps were created before flatpak: in a sense, RedHat wanted to go at it "alone" (or at least separately from Canonical) with xdg-app/Flatpak. These ideas were already present even before those times and outside of both RH/Canonical, so it was more of a who's committed first. Basically, Ubuntu phones were using click packages (predecessor to snaps) back in 2011 and 2012, with snapcraft shi…

And lets not forget an even more prominent example: Upstart by Canonical that RedHat replaced with Systemd. Basically, Canonical will start at a project first, but RedHat specifically will look for ways to not join them, and start their own project instead. Part of that is certainly due to Canonical itself, but I can't help but think a lot of it is RH making a call and then throwing more developers at something.

The reason why Lennart decided to start systemd is publicly documented: the 2 facts that upstart had a serious design flaw requiring large changes, and that Canonical required copyright assignment for those changes. CLAs that unilaterally benefit a single for-profit business entity are generally seen as problematic.

Read this thread:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327/https://plus.goog...

Here, Upstart author and former Canonical employee Scott James Remnant wrote:

Had the CLA not been in place, the result of the LF Collab discussions would have almost certainly been contributions of patches from +Kay Sievers and Lennart (after all, we'd all worked together on things like udev, and got along) that would have fixed all those design issues, etc.

But the CLA prevented them from doing that (I won't sign the CLA myself, which is one reason I don't contribute since leaving Canonical - so I hold no grudges here), so history happened differently. After our April 2010 meeting, Lennart went away and wrote systemd, which was released in July 2010 if memory serves.

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